Paypal treats anyone outside the US like dirt, so it'd be great to have an alternative.
Think about what they'd have done if you *had* shipped that laptop. Would they have taken responsibility for their mistake? I doubt it. It's easy not to suck if you only look at the best case scenarios.
You don't generally get much regulation in low barrier industries, other than safety/health/environment, which any sane person recognizes as necessary.
Regulation gets us a functioning economy. We tried running things with minimal regulation, once. We got the Great Depression for our trouble. Arguing for trying that again is about on par with arguing for trying out a command economy again.
Regulations in telecom do exactly what you're suggesting, with somewhat less governmental footprint. The large telcos are required to allow other companies use and sell their network, which has done away with monopolies in the long distance telephone industry. Now that that industry is almost obsolete, the telcos want to make sure the same thing doesn't happen with the internet.
The real problem is not the number of people, but that there's no good way to make a low-budget video game. You can make a good movie for very little money by not spending $100 million on special effects and marketing. Video games don't work like that. If you don't spend the money on having good graphics artists, your game looks like crap.
That's almost it. To make a movie, you point a camera at something, and you've got content. That content can certainly be improved with special effects, actors, direction and thousand of other things, but the base effort is very low. A video game, on the other hand, needs people to generate *all* content. Pointing a computer at something doesn't generally produce anything.
Can I have some of what you're smoking? A monopoly doesn't have to compete, because it has the resources to crush or buy out any emergent competition. In the case at hand, the telecom industry has a massive, natural, barrier to entry in the cost of building a network.
Point to a first world nation with a totally free market. Every time it's been tried, it's failed, miserably.
Actually, quite the opposite. Unregulated markets collapse into a series of monopolies. It can sometimes be safe (and benificial) to take the reigns off of a healthy market with low barrier to entry and thriving competition. The telecom industry is about as far as you can get from that, so any arguement that it should be unregulated is just ignorant.
$25/month is not in any way competitive for transfering voice quality audio. There's no technical justification for any fee at all over what you already pay for a network connection. The only reason any fee at all is justifyable is for a connection to the old POTS system. We should be working on getting people to give up that interface, rather than replicating it at absurd prices.
You can't keep the system running after it's been compromised, because you can't trust it to do what you tell it to. Your checksum generator, for example, may have been modified to always give certain values for certain files. Even if you use binaries off of a read only medium, there may be a hidden process watching for repairs, ready to put it's changes right back after you've fixed them. It can be valuable to take an image of the compromised system before wiping it, to find out how your were compromised.
If a service is important enough that you don't want to bring it down for maintenance after it's been rooted, its important enough to have another, offline machine ready to take its place.
As for hiding rootkits in data, this is certainly possible, but you won't have any scripts or binaries run with permissions in there (otherwise it's part of the system). While having the rootkit still available will help a recompromise, it could probably be just as easily retrieved from the net, once they're back in.
I'm not in the habit of helping along the next generation of script kiddies. If you're smart enough to use the information responsibly, you're also smart enough to figure it out on your own.
Beyond that, I've no interest in further enlightening you. Cross your fingers and hope no one who knows what they're doing ever targets you, because you're a low hanging fruit for anyone who does.
This is true, but how do you tell the difference between a script kiddie, and someone trying to look like one? Yes, you could keep a checksum of every file on the system, but verifying that would take longer than just reimaging. If you've set the system up correctly in the first place, with data files on separate partitions from system files, reimaging should be painless.
You are talking out of your ass. I am not a Windows user, but I would be capable of burying a trojan in your system such that you wouldn't likely find it by that method. Certainly not without spending *much* more time than reimaging, which is the standard practice after a box as been compromised in any professional enviroment, which you quite obviously are not familiar with.
Your method will work most of the time cleaning up after some peon such as yourself who's just fucked things up, but is is not a wise course of action against a determined, experienced intruder.
You clearly do not understand how package managers work. While you would be able to track the base files installed, you wouldn't be able to do so with files generated files (take a look through/var...), nor would you be able to do so with intentionally changed files. (ie, config files, which often point to binaries to be executed) By your method, you'd have to go through every config file by hand, because if you're not keeping backup images, you're probably not keeping logs of what you've changed.
Yes, in theory, a Linux system can be cleaned without reimaging it. Not practically though, and there's always the possibility you missed something. If a box is known to have been compromised, the only reasonable thing to do is reimage it to a known-good state.
It's easy to clean a Linux box (if you should ever get infected).
No, it isn't. Do you have an md5 for all of your binaries? It could be hiding in any of them, ready to reinfest as soon as you run something as innocent as "ps".
It isn't wrong to eat animals. My point was simply that a developed nation has plenty of food to go around, and there's no *need* for anyone to go off and kill something in the bush to feed themselves.
The second amendment is one of those things that make people think Usians are stupid. You are absolutely no threat to the government, with or without any gun you can buy. Call me when you have APC's, mortors, and air strike capability.
The difference is that guns serve absolutely no purpose other than to kill things. People in developed nations do not need to supplement their diet with wild meat, and if they do they should be assisted through a more rational way.
As for self defense, guns cause far more danger than they avert. And as you say, many other tools can be used to injure, and thus can be used for self defense.
All the airport terminal's I've been in have been very expansive. A small bomb wouldn't do any major damage to the building, and there isn't any especially expensive equipment around (compared to commercial airliners). I'm not aware of anyone being held liable for terrorism, and the bad PR from a terminal bombing would be considerably less than that of a mid air bombing.
From the financial perspective of airlines, it's much better to have a bomb go off on the ground, even if it kills more people.
Slashdot Mirror
When was the last time you where in a building without electricity?
The real problem is that they're not regulated. When fraud happens through real banks, they have to eat it, and so should Paypal.
http://gmail.google.com
Paypal treats anyone outside the US like dirt, so it'd be great to have an alternative.
Think about what they'd have done if you *had* shipped that laptop. Would they have taken responsibility for their mistake? I doubt it. It's easy not to suck if you only look at the best case scenarios.
Because they'll use checkout.google.com, like sensible people?
You don't generally get much regulation in low barrier industries, other than safety/health/environment, which any sane person recognizes as necessary.
Regulation gets us a functioning economy. We tried running things with minimal regulation, once. We got the Great Depression for our trouble. Arguing for trying that again is about on par with arguing for trying out a command economy again.
Regulations in telecom do exactly what you're suggesting, with somewhat less governmental footprint. The large telcos are required to allow other companies use and sell their network, which has done away with monopolies in the long distance telephone industry. Now that that industry is almost obsolete, the telcos want to make sure the same thing doesn't happen with the internet.
No, there's no technical reason for Halo 2 (or any other game in anyone's pipeline) to require Vista.
The real problem is not the number of people, but that there's no good way to make a low-budget video game. You can make a good movie for very little money by not spending $100 million on special effects and marketing. Video games don't work like that. If you don't spend the money on having good graphics artists, your game looks like crap.
That's almost it. To make a movie, you point a camera at something, and you've got content. That content can certainly be improved with special effects, actors, direction and thousand of other things, but the base effort is very low. A video game, on the other hand, needs people to generate *all* content. Pointing a computer at something doesn't generally produce anything.
Can I have some of what you're smoking? A monopoly doesn't have to compete, because it has the resources to crush or buy out any emergent competition. In the case at hand, the telecom industry has a massive, natural, barrier to entry in the cost of building a network.
Point to a first world nation with a totally free market. Every time it's been tried, it's failed, miserably.
Actually, quite the opposite. Unregulated markets collapse into a series of monopolies. It can sometimes be safe (and benificial) to take the reigns off of a healthy market with low barrier to entry and thriving competition. The telecom industry is about as far as you can get from that, so any arguement that it should be unregulated is just ignorant.
So does IPv4, but no one honours it.
$25/month is not in any way competitive for transfering voice quality audio. There's no technical justification for any fee at all over what you already pay for a network connection. The only reason any fee at all is justifyable is for a connection to the old POTS system. We should be working on getting people to give up that interface, rather than replicating it at absurd prices.
Why do we always look for organic life? Because we know for a fact that that sort of life is possible.
You can't keep the system running after it's been compromised, because you can't trust it to do what you tell it to. Your checksum generator, for example, may have been modified to always give certain values for certain files. Even if you use binaries off of a read only medium, there may be a hidden process watching for repairs, ready to put it's changes right back after you've fixed them. It can be valuable to take an image of the compromised system before wiping it, to find out how your were compromised.
If a service is important enough that you don't want to bring it down for maintenance after it's been rooted, its important enough to have another, offline machine ready to take its place.
As for hiding rootkits in data, this is certainly possible, but you won't have any scripts or binaries run with permissions in there (otherwise it's part of the system). While having the rootkit still available will help a recompromise, it could probably be just as easily retrieved from the net, once they're back in.
I'm not in the habit of helping along the next generation of script kiddies. If you're smart enough to use the information responsibly, you're also smart enough to figure it out on your own.
Beyond that, I've no interest in further enlightening you. Cross your fingers and hope no one who knows what they're doing ever targets you, because you're a low hanging fruit for anyone who does.
This is true, but how do you tell the difference between a script kiddie, and someone trying to look like one? Yes, you could keep a checksum of every file on the system, but verifying that would take longer than just reimaging. If you've set the system up correctly in the first place, with data files on separate partitions from system files, reimaging should be painless.
You are talking out of your ass. I am not a Windows user, but I would be capable of burying a trojan in your system such that you wouldn't likely find it by that method. Certainly not without spending *much* more time than reimaging, which is the standard practice after a box as been compromised in any professional enviroment, which you quite obviously are not familiar with.
/var...), nor would you be able to do so with intentionally changed files. (ie, config files, which often point to binaries to be executed) By your method, you'd have to go through every config file by hand, because if you're not keeping backup images, you're probably not keeping logs of what you've changed.
Your method will work most of the time cleaning up after some peon such as yourself who's just fucked things up, but is is not a wise course of action against a determined, experienced intruder.
You clearly do not understand how package managers work. While you would be able to track the base files installed, you wouldn't be able to do so with files generated files (take a look through
Yes, in theory, a Linux system can be cleaned without reimaging it. Not practically though, and there's always the possibility you missed something. If a box is known to have been compromised, the only reasonable thing to do is reimage it to a known-good state.
It's easy to clean a Linux box (if you should ever get infected).
No, it isn't. Do you have an md5 for all of your binaries? It could be hiding in any of them, ready to reinfest as soon as you run something as innocent as "ps".
It isn't wrong to eat animals. My point was simply that a developed nation has plenty of food to go around, and there's no *need* for anyone to go off and kill something in the bush to feed themselves.
The second amendment is one of those things that make people think Usians are stupid. You are absolutely no threat to the government, with or without any gun you can buy. Call me when you have APC's, mortors, and air strike capability.
The difference is that guns serve absolutely no purpose other than to kill things. People in developed nations do not need to supplement their diet with wild meat, and if they do they should be assisted through a more rational way.
As for self defense, guns cause far more danger than they avert. And as you say, many other tools can be used to injure, and thus can be used for self defense.
Web 2.1 is out and ready.
It was intended as dark humour.
All the airport terminal's I've been in have been very expansive. A small bomb wouldn't do any major damage to the building, and there isn't any especially expensive equipment around (compared to commercial airliners). I'm not aware of anyone being held liable for terrorism, and the bad PR from a terminal bombing would be considerably less than that of a mid air bombing.
From the financial perspective of airlines, it's much better to have a bomb go off on the ground, even if it kills more people.
People are replaceable, 767s cost millions of dollars...
I am *INCREDIBLY* pissed about the Season 2 Dead Like Me box set having a two minute unskippable anti-piracy advert
Like me, you'd never have even known about it if you'd pirated it in the first place.